"I can't do that!" Vila protested
automatically. "It's.. it's..." He fumbled, lost for the words he
wanted.

Avon shifted his position, not
totally immune to Vila's distress. "Whatever you do, it won't bring
Gan back," he pointed out logically. "Do you want me to do the
job?"

Vila looked up in surprise at the
offer, then declined. "No," he said. "Gan was my friend, not yours.
You never gave a damn about him anyway." He started taking items down
from a set of shelves: a holocube of a group of mountains that
developed a snowstorm when you shook it; a pile of booktapes; a couple
of fir cones. Fir cones? Where on Earth, or any other world for that
matter, had Gan picked those up? Vila shook his head. It was amazing
what could be collected in a couple of years bumming about the galaxy.
He moved onto the next shelf, gathering up a clock, and a bottle of
some patent remedy guaranteed to cure all forms of depression of the
spirit. Had Gan really believed in that stuff? Maybe he'd been
desperate enough to try anything when his limiter was playing up.
Further along there was a small cuddly toy - hard to say what sort of
animal it was meant to represent - a bear possibly. Vila rather liked
the look of it in spite of its garish colour. He decided to keep it
as a memento. Next was a mass of modelling clay - some amateur work
of art, and obviously unfinished. Vila lifted it down for a better
look. A woman's head, but no one he recognised. She wasn't terribly
pretty. Wanting to remember Gan by his achievements and not by his
failures, Vila took aim in the general direction of the waste disposal
chute to see if he could hit it first
try.

"Leave
it."

Vila turned around at the command.
"Are you trying to tell me," he demanded in outright disbelief, "that
you want this piece of
junk?"

Avon held out a hand. "Give it to
me."

Vila was tempted to hold back,
just to annoy him, but there was something in Avon's expression that
brooked no denial. He handed the sculpture over, settling for verbal
insults instead. "You, the alpha connoisseur? You're lowering your
standards a bit aren't
you?"

Avon stared Vila hard in the eye,
then gave his full attention to the sculpture, turning it round and
round in his hands -
remembering.

The ground underfoot was slippery and uneven, the light from the
torches they held, totally inadequate. Avon cursed as he scrambled
over a broken rock, his boot landing in a pool of water. At this
point the roof of the cave was too low to allow him to stand up fully,
and he was developing an ache in his
neck.

"I thought Blake's informant said
these caves were passable," he
snarled.

"Jorgens was a caving enthusiast,"
Gan replied. "He went all through this cavern system years before the
base was
built."

"Are you telling me," Avon said in
stark disbelief, "that he went through here for
fun?"

Gan shone his torch over a veil of
translucent rock that flowed down the far wall of the cave. "It
is beautiful," he
said.

Avon didn't bother to answer that.
Beauty was fine when you were above ground and in a comfortable
position to appreciate it. Several hundred metres underground in a
series of limestone caves with water running through them, was not his
idea of the perfect place to be. He shone his torch along the line of
the stream, seeking the entrance to the next cave. "Charming," he
muttered under his breath. The water entered the current cavern
through a narrow crevice. They were going to have to wade through
knee-deep water - it was bound to get inside their boots. That was in
addition to the delights of trying to squeeze between two irregular
walls that refused to do anything so sensible as maintaining a
straight
vertical.

He didn't even give that one the
dignity of a reply. They'd be under the base's shield soon, and the
prospect of a communication's blackout was beginning to look
increasingly
attractive.

He flashed his torch at the
crevice ahead. It didn't seem any more inviting than it had before.
Avon sighed inwardly and moved forward, placing his feet carefully on
the rocks made slippery by the
stream.

"How much further?" Gan asked. He didn't seem at all tired. Boring
though his company was, Avon had to admit that Gan had been a good
choice for this expedition. He made light work of climbs that had
given Avon real problems. Much though he hated to admit it, Avon
wasn't sure that he'd have made it this far without Gan's help. That
thought was irritating in itself - dependency irked
Avon.

He glanced at the display on his
datapad. "If Jorgens' information was correct, then the water intake
should be somewhere in his
cavern."

"The well you
mean?"

"More or less. The water intake
for the base is supposed to run down an old well shaft." Avon sounded
sceptical.

"If we go round the walls in
opposite directions, we'll find it
faster."

Avon didn't bother to answer that.
He set off to the right, looking for signs of an opening in the roof.
Any shaft here would presumably end with the ceiling - there would
have been no need to build a solid wall down to the level of the
water.

The torchlight reflected off
metal. There was the pipe. It terminated in a deep pool which was
constantly refilled as the stream flowed into it. Looking up, Avon
could see the climb before them. The shaft went beyond the range of
his torch. The sides were rough and uneven. There were handholds
here and there, but for much of the climb, they were going to be
dependent on bracing themselves between the rock and the metal of the
pipe. For the first time, Avon had serious doubts as to whether they
would be able to enter the base at all. It was one thing for a caving
enthusiast to claim that the shaft was easy to climb - quite another
thing for two rebels, with minimal equipment beyond pitons and rope,
to
attempt.

Avon turned the clay around in his hands. The woman wasn't a classic
beauty; it was easy to see why Vila hadn't been interested in her.
Still, there was an indefinable quality to the face. Gan had
obviously taken great pains with his work. Gan had always taken care
in everything he
did.

Coming back down the shaft had
been no easier than going up it. Every muscle in Avon's back screamed
complaint. The sound of the distant explosions, magnified by the echo
from below, gave him a small degree of satisfaction: at least they had
achieved what they had come here to do. He wedged himself tightly
against the wall, checked the rope holding him to Gan, and brought his
wrist up to his mouth. "Liberator, this is
Avon."

No
reply.

Damn. He tried again. Still no
response. Either the Liberator was off station, or else the
explosions that had destroyed the research base had failed to take out
the shield
generator.

He looked up at Gan waiting
patiently above
him.

"I can't contact Liberator.
We'll have to get out of range of the shield before we know if they're
still there or
not."

"All right. Can you
manage?"

"Yes." He had to manage, there
was no other
option.

Three quarters of the way down,
Avon put too much weight on a badly driven piton and slipped. He fell
several metres in blind fear before the rope caught him and held. He
spun in the blackness, the torch dangling from his belt shining into
the depths below him. For a moment there was nothing below him but
emptiness, and nothing above him but the dazzling light of Gan's torch
shining in his eyes. Then Avon regained control; he reached out and
hooked his fingers around the cold, unyielding stone and felt the
comfort of its security. Gradually, he shifted his weight to where he
could feel himself supported by solid, unmoving
rock.

"Thanks," he said
quietly.

Gan let out some slack in the rope
to allow Avon freedom of movement. "The piton caught
you."

Avon said nothing. The rope had
been clipped onto a piton, but he'd felt the jerk of it pulling out as
he fell. Without Gan he'd have been
dead.

They moved on downwards without
any further exchange of
words.

The final scramble down into the cavern was a relief. Avon worked his
way down the wall and collapsed at the bottom, abused muscles
screaming out for relief. Gan sat beside him for a minute or so, the
silence around them absolute. In the quiet, Avon was conscious of the
sound of his on breathing, and the almost imperceptible sound of the
water flowing in its
course.

"Water?" Gan
asked.

Avon nodded and got to his feet.
He could use a drink. Squatting down by the water's edge, toes almost
in the water, he scooped up a handful of water. It was cold, but the
flavour was clear and
refreshing.

Gan drank beside him. "It's
flowing faster than
before."

Was it? The stream did seem a
little wider than he recalled. Avon came abruptly to his feet. "We'd
better get moving. If there's been heavy rain, these caverns could
flood."

The thought was not a pleasant
one. It hadn't rained recently near the base, but the stream's
catchment area and the nature of the local geology was largely
unknown. Rain seeping through the rocks from weeks ago, or falling on
a distant tributary, might cause the stream to suddenly become a
river. Flowing underground, its width constrained by the caves, it
would get deeper. How deep, Avon didn't like to guess. He started
walking without waiting to see if Gan was following him. Usually in a
dangerous situation, there was something he could do about it - fight,
argue, attempt to repair what was broken. Here, there was just the
implacable force of nature, and all he could do was flee and hope that
that would be
enough.

The route seemed even longer and
more tortuous than it had when they came in. Crawls through narrow
abandoned watercourses, climbs up slippery rock faces, and the
relentlessly increasing depth of the water when they were forced to
wade through it. There was no doubt now that the water level was
rising. Places where the water had barely come over his boot tops,
now soaked Avon well up his
legs.

He tried his bracelet again, more
from discipline than optimism. The lack of any response came as no
surprise. If Liberator had been able to make contact, they
would have been trying to call him by now. He half turned as he heard
Gan behind him trying his own bracelet. A pointless exercise really,
but there was always the chance that Avon's own bracelet was faulty.
Gan shook his head. No luck there
either.

Avon turned back again, and
slipped. A wet stone skidded from under his foot in the dim light,
and he fell awkwardly. Pain shot through his leg as a rock caught him
under the shin. His torch smashed onto the ground and promptly went
out.

"Avon! Are you all
right?"

He tried to sit up, and his leg
screamed agony. He felt slightly sick, his original sharp retort
dying
unspoken.

There was reproach on Gan's face.
"I've been trying to study. I can't kill, I have have to find some
way to be of
use."

Another convert to Blake's
cause.

"And just how far have your
studies taken you?" Avon asked
suspiciously.

"Not very far yet, but," he added,
sounding surprisingly firm, "I do know a broken bone, and I do know
what to do about
it."

"And if there's nothing to use as
a splint, what does your medical genius say then?" Avon answered
caustically. He almost regretted saying that. Gan was trying to help
him after all.

"We wait," Gan said as though it
was totally obvious.

Wait. Something inside Avon
panicked at the thought. He was sitting in a shallow pool of water
now. If the water rose any further, they would be completely trapped.
"We can't wait," he insisted. "It's too dangerous."

"We don't have any choice. I
could carry you through the larger caverns, but you'd never make it
through the crawlways. Some of the lower sections will be totally
underwater by now. Don't worry, Blake will come for
us."

Blake will come for us, Avon
though sourly. That was terrific. Always assuming that Liberator
was still in one piece, always assuming that Blake could make it
through the caves, always assuming that they didn't drown first. But
Gan had faith in Blake, and Gan would do exactly what Blake would have
have done in similar circumstances: stay in spite of the risk to
himself. Avon found that attitude irritating - he disliked being
obliged to anyone.

Gan fumbled through voluminous
pockets, before finally coming up with one of the Liberator's
healing pads. "Here, let me try this. It won't fix the bone, but it
should take some of the pain away."

Avon refrained from protest as Gan
ripped the leg of his trousers and rocked the pad over the injury. At
least the break was above the top of his boot. The idea of having to
remove the boot without anything to cut the leather was not one he
liked to contemplate. As the pad took effect, the pain subsided to a
dull ache. Water swirled blackly around him, odd bits of debris
floating on the surface. Small whorls and eddies formed around his
feet and where he sat. The cold and wet seeped into his clothing.
Avon
shivered.

"I'll hold you. Just lean on me
and keep your weight on your good leg."

Without waiting for a reply, Gan
leaned down and lifted Avon up as though he were nothing more than a
small child.

Reluctantly, Avon draped one arm
around Gan's neck and allowed the giant to support him around the
waist. Gan was warm, and that, surprisingly was a comfort in itself.
Maybe it was the pain from his leg, or perhaps it was a side effect of
the drug in the pad, whatever it was, Avon felt oddly light headed.
His mind was drifting to other times and other arms around him. Warm,
gentle,
loving.

He really ought to get up and go
to work, but she was there beside him, holding him close, the look on
her face one of teasing affection. She traced a finger gently down
the line of his cheek bone and
smiled.

"Anna." He wasn't even aware that
he had spoken her name out
loud.

"Who?"

Avon awake from his reverie with a
start. The water had risen several centimetres without him even
noticing.

"No one, just someone I knew a
long time ago."

Blake would have pointed out the
inconsistency of that statement, but Gan seemed to accept it. "I knew
someone once," he offered. "She was a little bit like you in some
ways."

Really? Didn't Gan realise that
comparing Avon to his ex-girlfriend wasn't exactly the most generous
of
comparisons.

"I'm flattered," he said
insincerely, and wondered if Gan would notice the
irony.

"Marie was a beta, far brighter
than
me."

"That's not
difficult."

Gan was silent. Avon sighed
inwardly. He'd done it again. Blake or Vila would have bounced right
back with an insult in response, but Gan tended to soak it all up
without retaliating. Actually, thinking about it, Gan did manage a
suitable riposte on occasion - it was just that the occasions tended
to be few and far between. Well, if he tried to be sympathetic for
once, nobody was going to know except for himself and
Gan.

"What was she
like?"

He could hear the enthusiasm in
Gan's voice as he
answered.

"She was bright, enthusiastic,
loved talking and playing games. I never knew what she saw in me."

So what had she seen in slow,
methodical, plodding Gan? Gan who was still supporting him without
complaint, in spite of the burden that Avon's weight must have become.
Avon surprised himself by replying, "Kindness. Understanding.
Loyalty?"

The water wasn't quite up to the
top of his boots, but they had water inside them already, so that was
almost academic. His feet were cold and almost numb. "What was
that?" Gan had said something, but he'd missed it.

"Anna? What kind of a woman was
she?"

So, if they were going to drown
here underground they were going to do it while swooping details of
their lost loves. Why not?

"Witty, good with people, clever
with computers. Anna was special."

"Were you married?"

Avon ignored the question and
tried to move his foot, to see if he still had any sensation in his
toes. Pain lanced up his leg and he gasped in pain.

Gan's arm tightened around him.
"What happened?"

"I tried to move my foot."

"That was stupid."

All right, so it had been stupid,
but he was increasingly cold, and the pain in his leg wasn't helping
him to think straight.

"Do you want me to use the pad
again?"

"Yes." It would probably make him
even more woozy, but the pain was doing that anyway. There seemed
little point in martyrdom. Avon balanced as well as he could on one
leg, steadying himself with a hand against Gan, while Gan bent down to
apply the pad once more. The water was too deep now for either of
them to sit down. A soothing calmness spread out from the pad and
Avon relaxed a little.

"I won't be able to use it again,"
Gan said.

"Why not?"

"That's the maximum dose for
someone of your body weight. Besides, the water will be over the
break, soon."

They stood in silence for several
minutes, Gan supporting most of Avon's weight once more. Avon wasn't
sure if it was his imagination or not, but the water seemed to be
rising faster than before.

"So, did you marry her?" Gan
asked.

"No," Avon said shortly. What
right did Gan have to pry into his private life anyway?

"Marie and I were married. We had
some good times to start
with."

"So what went wrong?" It wasn't
that he was curious, Avon told himself. It was just that anything was
better than concentrating on the rising water level.

Gan looked at the power indicator
on his torch, instead of answering. "I'm going to turn it out for a
while. It's got several hours charge left, but we don't know how long
it will be before the water level drops."

The light vanished and Avon felt a
moment of real fear. The dome dweller's nightmare. No light meant
power failure, and power failure meant loss of life support. He felt
Gan shudder slightly. "Have you ever lived through a power failure?"
Avon asked.

"Yes," Gan replied in the
darkness. "Back during the food riots of '46." Avon felt him swallow
convulsively. "A whole sector went out. They say several people died
before the air circulation was restored."

"You thought the Federation killed
her? They did. Twice. First with their drugs and then with a gun.
Do you want to know why you reminded me of her?"

"All right." Avon had a certain
mild curiosity.

"She never accepted anything at
face value. She didn't believe anything just because she was told
that it was so. Until the drugs. After then she believed everything.
She stopped questioning. She died"'

A living death, and the full
horror was that she would never have known it was happening to her.
Would he have preferred that death for Anna? The invisible death of
the lower grades, drowned in drugs and oblivion. Would she have
preferred that to dying in agony at the hands of the torturers? Which
death would he choose for himself if he had the choice? Anything
surely rather than this meaningless death underground.

"Anna died trying to protect me."
The words were little more than a whisper. He'd never been able to
talk about it to anyone before now. Gan hadn't been able to save his
woman either. Somehow, that made it possible to say it to him.

"She must have loved you very
much."

"I like to think so."

"What happened?"

The memories came crowding back.
The pain of when he'd been shot; the helplessness he'd felt. It
seemed hideously close to his present situation.

"We were on the run. I'd just
pulled a major bank fraud. I'd gone to buy some exit visas; Anna was
waiting for me to get back. I was stupid enough to get shot."

"You
too?"

Avon waited a moment to see if Gan
was going to say any more, then he carried on. "It was two days
before I was able to look for her. But they'd already caught her.
There was a place where we'd arranged to meet up if anything went
wrong. She wasn't there, but neither was anyone else - she never told
them. They tortured her to death, but she never told them where to
find me."

Cold and blackness. The water
numbed all sensation. It would be so easy to let go of Gan, slip into
the waist-high water and forget everything. Except that Gan would
only pull him out again. Besides, that would be a surrender, and he
owed it to Anna to keep fighting against those who had killed her.

Gan's voice sounded deeper then
usual, as though he was trying not to betray his emotion. "Marie
betrayed me. I caught her in bed with another man."

"You should have killed her."

"No." He could feel the movement
as Gan shook his head. "You don't understand - it wasn't her fault,
it was the drugs. He told her to do it - and she did. She didn't
really want to hurt
me."

How was it, Avon wondered, that a
man of Gan's size and bulk had the ability to convey a feeling of
utter
helplessness?

"But she did hurt
you."

Gan sighed. "He knew it too. He
knew I'd never let it rest. He shot me; then he shot Marie. Even the
drugs wouldn't have kept her quiet after my death." He was silent a
moment. "And then I killed him. I broke his neck while he looked at
her dead
body."

Avon could feel the strength of
that silent passion. The struggle of a wounded man to survive, to
gain revenge. Someday, somehow, he would too have revenge for Anna.
At this moment though, he didn't feel strong enough to think straight,
let alone tackle the man who had killed
her.

Something about Gan's story was
bothering him. If he could only concentrate for a moment, He'd be
able to work it out. If only his head didn't feel so fuzzy, and his
body so cold. The water lapped gently around his fingers, leeching
the heat from his body and sapping his will. Avon clenched his fists
tightly in an effort to regain control, the nails digging into the
palms of his hands. The control drugs had never been a problem for a
man in his profession, anyone working in a job that required original
thinking was bound to have access to undrugged food and water.

That was what was bothering him.
Gan had been sentenced to Cygnus Alpha for murder.

"So how come you were able to kill
him? Weren't you drugged too?"

"I thought you knew: I'm immune to
the drugs. That's why they fitted the limiter."

No, he hadn't known - he'd never
been interested enough to ask. Gan was simply Gan, a gamma ignorant,
and a convenient source of heavy muscle. Gan who had had to watch an
intelligent woman fade away into nothing as a result of Federation
policies, as helpless as Avon had been to help Anna in the Federation
prison.

He squeezed Gan's shoulder for a
moment. "It wasn't your fault."

"It wasn't yours either."

Maybe neither of them could really
accept absolution, they'd both loved too deeply, and lost too much,
but it helped a little. The darkness was beckoning again, and this
time Avon allowed it to flow over him. Gan would protect him. And
believing that, he could allow himself to fade into unconsciousness.

The clay was warm in his hands where he'd been holding
it.

It had only been a couple of weeks
since Blake had brought them out of the caves. Avon hadn't fully
regained consciousness until they were back on Liberator. He
had fuzzy memories of stretchers and ropes, but that was all. He'd
forgotten most of the rest until now.

Gan obviously hadn't forgotten
though - he must have had assistance from Orac to get the features
correct. But no photograph from the computer files had ever had that
tender, loving smile. No DNA profile could ever have predicted the
laughter around the eyes. Avon looked at the crude carving that had
somehow captured Anna's essence so perfectly, and knew it for what it
was: the last gift of a friend he'd never known he had.